Monthly Archives: December 2008

You know all those snowstorms everybody’s been talking about? They affected our weekend, but we still had fun.

On Friday we were going to go to Gwar. Jon was excited. I tried my best to read up on Gwar mythos so I would appreciate the show more. We were all set but then they cancelled the show because of the storm. So we stayed home and played Mario Party and I was looking forward to making Happiness Cocoa, but I didn’t realize that the blue and white box in the cupboard was not Swiss Miss, but a big box of packets of Equal. Then it was too late. I tried to make a modified form of Happiness Cocoa by adding mint julep and Bailey’s Irish cream to peppermint tea. The results were only mildly happy.

In the morning we set off to New York City to see a play directed by Jesse. But first we had to shovel the porch and the car. Jon started on the porch and sidewalk while I cleared off the car. While we were doing this, Annoying Upstairs Hippy Neighbor caught Jon and said exuberantly “Isn’t it beautiful?” To which Jon said “Yes” and continued to toil. Annoying Upstairs Hippy Neighbor didn’t offer to help shovel the common porch with us. Instead he said “I’m going sledding today! What are you doing today?”

“Well, I’m shoveling the common porch…”

It’s nice to see a man in his mid-thirties so at peace with his inner Chi that he finds joy and beauty in everyday things and childlike delights. Jon thought about hitting him with the shovel. I should point out that he didn’t give so much as a rhetorical “can I help?” before going back inside. I’m sure he feels that since he rides a bike instead of driving he’s special and doesn’t have to shovel off the sidewalk.

We werent in New York for very long. Just long enough to look at the big Christmas tree in Rockefeller Center, shrug , meet a friend of Jon’s for one beer, head to the play, enjoy it throughly, get drinks afterward, go to bed, get up, get a bagel and start driving for 7 hours.

It took longer than usual to get back from NYC because the roads in Connecticut were full of suck and accidents and snow.

There was a lot of this going on:

Isn’t it beautiful? It makes me want to go sledding!

This one was especially frightening because we were forced to crawl by it at slow speeds and it kept flaring up with new bursts of flame and massive explosion appeared imminent. We survived, though, and there didn’t seem to be any human remains in the car so I think they all escaped as well.

I wish I had paid more attention and counted how many accidents we saw. Maybe a googol? Or ten googol? I want to say it was about one googol, but I have this fantasy that Jon will comment here and tell me that if there were actually googol accidents across the state of Connecticut, the cars would have to be piled in stacks of 6.02 x 10^23 on both sides in order to have enough room on rte 84 for them. Exaggerations aside, there were moles of accidents today, I swear.

Now we’re home and alive and instead of being bored from having stayed home all weekend due to snowstorms, we can feel like we accomplished something. It means we won’t have to feel guilty about going to bed at 6:30 pm.

Edit:: Jon weighed in on the math problem: “I-84 through Connecticut is 98 miles long. That’s 517,440 feet. Both sides of the road and medians, so that’s times four, is 2,069,760 feet. Divided by, say, 12 feet per crunched car (a Mini Cooper is 13 feet long for comparison) is 172,480 accident sites per layer of cars along I-84 in Connecticut. 1 x 10^100 divided by 172,480 is 5.8 x 10^94. So a bit more than a mole.“